Would “Seven Days” style time travel technology be any use?
In the Seven Days series, the time travel technology came with the limitation that they could only go back at most seven days which, of course, knocked out all the normal time travel tricks that various pundits have came up with.
However, if you think about it, chances are that if/when someone does build a time travel machine then it almost certainly would have limitations along those lines. More than likely the first experimental use will involve travel back/forward just a matter of seconds or minutes rather than centuries. My guess is that it will have limitations for quite a while as the technology is worked on. After all, the first plane didn’t go terribly far and the top speed of the first car was a fairly sedate 10 miles per hour.
Chances are too that, regardless of who develops the technology, that it will be grabbed by some government organisation because, let’s face it, time travel would be a pretty serious weapon in the hands of the “wrong people” (whichever way you define that).
Anyway, let’s suppose that we do have such a technology and that we can’t go back more than seven days (in the absence of any logical way of deciding what the real limit might be initially). Would it be any use?
Perhaps the best example of how you might use it would be to prevent 9/11. After all, that was an event that could have been stopped had the relevant information been available as little as a day ahead of time. Or could it? Were the planes used the only ones with terrorists onboard? How do we know that there weren’t more people who would have boarded other planes for a similar attack later the same day but couldn’t as everything was grounded? We could go on for ages with such assumptions, but let’s assume that those were the only planes that would ever have been involved.
Had the technology been available then, would it have been used? Your first reaction is probably “yes, of course”. Think about the implications if it had been used though. Yes, thousands of people would have been saved that day, but that single event changed a number of significant events afterwards. Wars were started based on the premise that they had to be to prevent further 9/11s, security in airports around the world was tightened up presumably preventing various attacks, more significantly perhaps the public attitude towards terrorism in America changed dramatically making it quite dangerous to be labelled a terrorist (hence the likes of the IRA downing tools for example).
In fact, what you’d really need would be the capability to analyse the full impact of removing 9/11 from history before you said “let’s erase that event”.
If you were a conspiracy theorist, you might wonder how come there don’t appear to be any events in the recent past where a Seven Days style time travel device could have been used (for that matter, how come the series was cancelled just as it seemed to be getting closer to reality). All we’ve had of late have been ongoing events that look rather difficult to resolve and certainly going back seven days wouldn’t fix any of them. Interesting, eh?
Anyway, forget about jumbo jet time travel capability and think more Wright brothers and you’ll get closer to what the very first time travel machine will be able to do.
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